A quantitative cross-architecture study of morphological image processing on CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs

The rapidly growing applications based on morphological operations in image processing and computer vision make efficient implementations of these key blocks an important topic of research. Nevertheless, a detailed comparison of the energy efficiency and performance of these implementations that covers all available major hardware platforms is still missing. In this paper we evaluate the performance and power consumption of the most efficient available morphological image processing algorithms for CPU, GPU, and FPGA platforms in detail. In addition, we study the suitability of available morphological library units for high-level synthesis and compare the results with an optimized hand-coded FPGA implementation. We demonstrate that even high-end GPUs cannot achieve the throughputs of modern CPUs and FPGAs by far. Our experimental results show that an FPGA implementation is 8–10 times more energy efficient for this application, being comparable in speed to CPUs for large kernels.